Simona Forti, "one of the most interesting Italian philosophers today," joins the Library of Social Science think tank. Her book New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today, articulates and illuminates the phantasy that was the bedrock of Nazism and the Holocaust.  An extract from Chapter Four, "Thanatopolitics and absolute victims," appears below.

Abstract: "According to Richard Koenigsberg, Hitler and his men expected Germany to conform to the law of the immune system, and it did so. In the same way any other organism singled out and recognized cells foreign to it and automatically destroyed them, so did the German body politic. At the heart of the National Socialist ideology, there lay the conviction that the German nation, as a real political body, was suffering from a disease caused by a potentially deadly infection—triggered by infectious agents identifiable with the Jewish microorganism.

"Fascinated by the power of these corporeal fantasies, Hitler and his followers conceived their mission as a sequence of therapeutic phases. After an accurate, but ruthless, diagnosis of the disease, they had to act according to the most rigorous, scientific logic of cause and effect, without shirking the weight of their responsibility for the treatment. At various points in his speeches and writings, the Fuhrer used the idea of Germany as a real organic body. Dazzled by the power of the metaphor, he continually returned to the relationship between cell and body: it was an inextricable bond that charged every cell with the responsibility for the health of the whole."

Simona Forti is Professor of Political Philosophy and Modern History  Read more about her on Wikipedia.   By Simona Forti For information on ordering through Amazon, PLEASE CLICK HERE. NEW DEMONS: Rethinking Power and Evil Today "Simona Forti is one of the most interesting Italian philosophers today. Her monograph is a challenging and innovative book destined to become a point of orientation for scholarly investigations on the topic." (Adriana Cavarero Political Theory) TABLE OF CONTENTS HERE

FROM CHAPTER 4, "Thanatopolitics & Absolute Victims

At the heart of the National Socialist ideology, lay the conviction that the German nation, as a real political body, was suffering from a disease caused by a potentially deadly infection—triggered by infectious agents that, to start with, were identifiable with the Jewish microorganism.

Fascinated by the power of these corporeal fantasies, Hitler and his followers conceived their mission as a sequence of therapeutic phases. After an accurate, but ruthless, diagnosis of the disease, they had to act according to the most rigorous, scientific logic of cause and effect, without shirking the weight of their responsibility for the treatment.

At various points in his speeches and writings, the Fuhrer used the idea of Germany as a real organic body. Dazzled by the power of the metaphor, he continually returned to the relationship between cell and body: it was an inextricable bond that charged every cell with the responsibility for the health of the whole.

We know how powerful this appeal was: rather than treating individual patients, doctors now felt called on to care for the entire German people; their mission was to become “biological soldiers" serving "the great idea of the National Socialist biological state structure."

The growing success of medical  and biological sciences, whose discoveries in the last decades of the nineteenth  century led to the isolation of many disease-carrying  microorganisms,  prompted  the Nazi  imaginary to literalize the metaphor  of Germany as a political  body.

Hitler thus became celebrated as the "Great Physician" of the German nation, the "Robert Koch" of politics. This makes sense of what Rudolf Hess proclaimed about National Socialism in a mass gathering in 1934, when he described it as nothing more than "applied biology."

The two-thousand-year-old biological metaphors, which the political lexicon had always co-opted, were freed from any conceptual mediation and literalized to the point of tearing down any divisions between biology and politics; more specifically, according to some interpreters, this total biopower was marked by a specific specialization of medicine and bi­ology, that of immunology.

According to Richard Koenigsberg, Hitler and his men expected Germany to function based on the law of the immune system, and so it did. A phantasy defined and created social reality: the projection of a shared phantasy. In the same way any other organism singled out and recognized cells foreign to it and automatically destroyed them, so did the German body politic.

Death was understood--not as the negation of life--but as an immunological strategy--expunging the infected part. In this frantic process of literalizing the medical metaphor, autoimmune disease is the figure that would explain the double tie between obsession for life and health on the one hand, and continuous extermination on the other. 

No longer content with’ attacking and annihilating the supposed "bacilli," "bacteria," "viruses," and "microbes," the immune system of the great body of Germany began to perceive a large part of its own organs as a threat as well.

Many actors or protagonists of the scene of evil perceived themselves as executors of a supreme moral law, which prompted them to act in conformity with that imperative. The famous speech Heinrich Himmler gave to the heads of the SS on October 4, 1943, in Posen (Poznan), exhorting them to be loyal to the Universal, is emblematic.

He views the extermination of the Jewish people as a "duty." In the face of this duty, "along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his dear Jew." Himmler understands the urge of his listeners to be exempted from the arduous task. 

He knows what it means, he says, to look on "when a hundred bodies lie together, when there are five hundred, or when there are a thousand." But this is where "our virtue" lies: to have observed all this and remained decent. "We have the moral duty" to the German people, "to kill this people who would kill us," but "we don't want to get sick and die from the same bacillus that we have exterminated." Himmler is proud to say that "our conscience," our soul, our interiority, have remained intact: "And we have suffered no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character."